Stirring Up A Cooking Revolution

How Berkeley Radical Alice Waters Became The Guru Of Gourmets

Her friends and coworkers are surprised she ranks it that high. The Berkeley radical Alice doesn`t believe people should have ``surplus money,``

ergo, a phenomenon her coworkers call ``spending money like Waters.`` If she could, she has said, she`d ``pass out money.``

And she does. For example, at the arrival of the first-of-the-season white truffles from northern Italy--they cost upwards of $500 a pound--she has been known to go skipping through the restaurant, shaving huge ribbons of the pungent mushrooms onto the plates of delighted customers, insisting that they taste, touch and learn to love this rare fungus as much as she does. ``It`s part of her need to combat the alienation most of us feel,`` explains Bertino. ``To give the alienated modern man wonderful food in a warm, hospitable atmosphere nourishes his body and his soul.``

``Alice feels people are quite alone,`` adds Marion Cunningham, the author of the revised classic ``The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,`` a 1981 best-seller. ``This ritual we do three times a day is too basic to life to turn it over to some unseen manufacturer who`s just out to make a dollar.``

Chez Panisse opened 15 years ago this August but only recently began turning a profit for its owners, Waters herself and a small group of friends and coworkers to whom she has given equity over the years. Last year was their most successful: Chez Panisse made $300,000 before taxes on a gross of $3 million, shared $100,000 of that with employees in profit sharing and bonuses and put another $100,000 into improvements. According to Luddy, it was only because of the success of her first cookbook that Waters was able to afford a down payment on a small, unpretentious Berkeley cottage. ``Thank God, her father came in (as an unpaid consultant) and protected her against her own inability to function as a businesswoman.``

When the restaurant opened in 1971, Waters had never even taken a cooking course. (She still hasn`t.) Instead, she had spent a year ``going out to restaurants so she could learn and watch,`` Luddy recalls. ``Alice couldn`t stand places where everyone was supercilious--no matter how good the food. She hated places where she couldn`t lean back and enjoy herself.

``In a very, very short period of time it became clear that even though the restaurant was crowded all the time, it was not going to make money,``

Luddy says. ``Running a restaurant was very hard work. It wasn`t like having a dinner party every night.``

At about that time her first chef, a Ph.D. in comparative literature who wanted to be a filmmaker, bailed out, and Waters, who admits she was terrified of the kitchen (``I didn`t think I could cook for that many people``), had to take over. (She has rotated on and off kitchen duty ever since.)

Luddy says, ``Many, many times I`d pick her up from the restaurant after an 18- or 20-hour day, walk her to the door, put the key in the lock, and she`d faint. She`d just pass out, and I`d have to carry her in and put her to bed. The next morning at 7 she would come awake like a shot, saying, `I have to call about the chickens.` I`d literally have to hold her down and tell her to `slowly count to 10. Then you can use the phone.`

``There were times when she got so vivid and overworked and compulsive she`d go totally blank. Lose her eyesight. I remember seeing her sitting on a huge overturned cooking pot, her head in her apron, waiting for her eyesight to come back. It was a big problem between the two of us. One of the reasons we broke up. I didn`t want her to kill herself.`` Another reason, he says, was that staff members--she hires only friends, friends of friends or children of friends--constantly took advantage of her.

The restaurant started on a $10,000 shoestring and was soon $40,000 in debt. Waters had distributed stock in the restaurant so that each of her friends who worked with her had the same number of shares as she did. At one point, two key employees decided to leave simultaneously and demanded $50,000 each for their stock. There was no contract, only Alice Waters` Berkeley idealism as a bond.

After buying out--for the full $100,000--her former employees, one of whom went on to start two competing restaurants but remains a friend, Alice Waters redistributed their stock to other employees. Many former staffers have gone on to start their own restaurants across the country. Others have gone on to start wholesale businesses that help supply the exquisite produce or fish Chez Panisse`s picky proprietor demands, or retail businesses in Berkeley`s